valparaiso

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hola!

sorry in advance for the punctiation, i cant find the apostrophe all on this key board, and the spelling, well lets put it down to the fact im in a hurry rather than im a bit stupid.

i suppose the rest of you are feeling a bit queezy today, but we havent even started yet. its about 4pm dec 31st and were having a rest before the party tonight. were in valparaiso, chile and tonight they hold a huge nye party with the biggest firework display (in the whole wide world ive heard) although we saw a poster that the fireworks looked more like a nuclear explosion - i might come back with an extra limb, or maybe one missing.

youve probably heard most of it from sera already, but so far everything has been going smashingly. plane trip was pretty hurrendous and then we paid AUS$120 for a taxi to our hostel in santiago - whoops - but then everything has been great. we thought santiago was a bit of a dump at first, but when we worked out how to get on the tube (we´d been walking right past it) we went to the markets on the second day and had a really nice walk around the city center. its surrounded by huge mountains and its pretty dry, bar the vinyards and small farms in the flat valleys.

yesterday our pigeon spanish, which is more like finch spanish, or maybe not even up to a bird level yet, maybe fly spanish, got us tickets to valparaiso. we had completos at the bus station (hot dog with advocado, tomato and some unexplainable sauce - yum) then sat at stop number 7. by this stage, after the tube and ticket wins, we thought we were pretty good. "how could this be wrong? it says stop 7" ha. we were in the wrong station and only just managed to get on our bus in time!

caught a taxi to our hostel in valparaiso and buzzed on the intercom. not so friendly response. a lady told us to go up the road to another hostel. turns out that hostel (which we booked through hostelworld.com and paid a deposit) has been a nut house for the past year. with people sleeping on the floor in the hostel because this time of year its so busy, we were unbelievably lucky hat the girls found us a place just up the hill. the place is lovely, run by a lady called vicky, who speaks a little english and makes a mean scone for breakfast, which megan describes as stodgy. cute rooms with awesome views and a clean bathroom.

weve walked around the town here, puffing up hills, blocking our noses every now and then and gripping the rails of those car lift things. its a funny place, with multi-coloured houses piled haphazardly on top of each other up the cliff and a port below. theres lots of activity going on today getting ready for tonight - a stage has been set up near the port and people are selling silly hats and massive party popper tubes. we will just go with the flow tonight, there seems to be lots of young hippy bohemian types that we will try find and hope that someone speaks english! everyone has been right in saying how you need to speak a bit of spanish here. weve got by so far but id hate to be in a situation that needed a lot of explaining.

ok well, happy new year. x

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